October is the month when, for some obscure and irrational reason, we all choose to be afraid.
We watch horror films. We let ourselves be drawn in by ghost stories. At the end of the month we even celebrate Halloween, a holiday built around monsters and creatures that, for the rest of the year, we do everything we can to avoid.
And yet the fear we experience every day does not belong to horror alone.
It has to do with how we act at work, when we choose to stay quiet rather than contradict our manager. It has to do with the decisions we make – or rather, the ones we should make, even when we fail to. And it also has to do with our imagination: the same imagination writers have shaped for centuries, trying to give form to what cannot be explained.
Last month we reflected on innovation, judgement and responsibility (here are Bliss’s recommended books for September, if you missed them); this month we start from a far more elementary emotion.
Three books, three different fears.
One we should eliminate. One we should learn to understand. And one that, at least for a few pages, is worth letting in.
Business – The Fearless Organization
Amy C. Edmondson · FrancoAngeli
One person notices that something isn’t working. They could say so, but they don’t.
Another has made a mistake and decides to hide it.
The last has an idea: a good idea, even, but during the meeting prefers to stay silent.
For Amy C. Edmondson, this is where the problem begins.
The Fearless Organization tackles the subject of psychological safety: the ability of people working within an organisation to ask questions, voice doubts, admit mistakes and put forward ideas without fear of being humiliated or penalised.
Edmondson has studied this phenomenon for over twenty years, seeking to show why fear within a group does not produce greater discipline. Just less information.
The team member who does not want to appear incompetent does not ask for help. Whoever fears a negative reaction hides the mistake. The result is an organisation that looks orderly, yet in which the most important information risks never reaching those who have to decide.
And this is precisely where the book becomes particularly relevant for those who lead a business.
Creating psychological safety means building an environment in which people can openly discuss what isn’t working before it becomes too costly to fix.
Because a company in which no one contradicts the top can look highly efficient.
At least until it turns out that everyone had seen the problem coming.
Why we recommend it: many companies look for people capable of taking responsibility, but forget that doing so also requires the freedom to say something uncomfortable. A book useful above all to those who lead others and want to understand how much information an organisation can lose when fear enters the room.
Psychology – La paura
Maria Rita Ciceri · il Mulino
Before it ever became a problem, fear was a solution.
When we lived in the wild, it made us run. Survive. It sharpened our attention in the face of possible danger and prepared our body to react long before we had time to think about what to do.
In her book La paura, Maria Rita Ciceri starts from the very function of this emotion to reconstruct its different levels: what happens in the brain, what happens in the body and how we assess a threat.
Of course, there is no single fear.
There is apprehension. Unease. Terror. Panic. Horror. Experiences we often use as synonyms, but which correspond to different intensities and mechanisms.
For all these reasons, being afraid means looking at the world through a different lens. It changes what we notice. It changes the weight we give to risks. And finally, when faced with awareness, it changes what we consider possible.
Understanding fear means understanding why it exists, when it protects us and when it starts to govern our behaviour in our place.
Only then can we stop being at its mercy and use it to our advantage.
Why we recommend it: it is short, accessible and lets us examine an emotion we all know without reducing it to a mere weakness to overcome. Before learning to control fear, it can help to understand why our brain has chosen to keep it for so long.
Fiction – The Great God Pan and Other Stories
Arthur Machen · Feltrinelli (or l’Ippocampo, for a splendid illustrated edition)
A doctor claims to have discovered a way to let human beings see the world as it truly is.
To paraphrase Schopenhauer, to lift the veil of Maya and see beyond what we perceive.
The only problem is proving it. To do so, he subjects a young woman to an experiment designed to open her inner eye. He succeeds. The experiment is a success. For a few moments, Mary sees something no human being should ever see.
But all of this will have consequences.
Back in 1890, Arthur Machen built a story out of testimonies, coincidences, suicides, encounters and incomplete documents, which make the anguished reader (seriously: the book is unsettling) an indirect, and uneasy, spectator of the horror.
That is why The Great God Pan still retains much of its power today: Machen does not try to show us the monster, but lets us sense that it exists.
And so horror arises from reality itself, which sits so close to all of us. A fear unlike the one built on chases, blood or sudden apparitions. It arrives slowly. It builds up. It constantly leaves something out of frame. It never goes away.
The new 2026 Feltrinelli edition brings together The Great God Pan and other stories by Machen, and reaches bookshops on the eve of October. A coincidence hard to ignore for our third pick of the month.
And perhaps it is also the best way to close this series.
After one book that tries to take fear out of organisations and one that tries to explain it, we needed at least one willing to do exactly the opposite: give it back to us.
Why we recommend it: the best horror rarely needs to show everything. Machen builds fear by leaving open a far more unsettling possibility: that the problem is not what we see, but what we are normally unable to see. In October, it is hard to ask for more.
Domande frequenti
What to read in October 2026?
For October we have chosen three books linked by the theme of fear. Amy C. Edmondson’s The Fearless Organization addresses psychological safety at work; Maria Rita Ciceri’s La paura explains the origins, manifestations and functions of this emotion; Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and Other Stories takes the theme into horror fiction.
What is psychological safety at work?
Psychological safety describes an environment in which people can voice doubts, flag mistakes, ask questions or put forward ideas without fear of personal consequences or humiliation. It is not the same as an absence of accountability. On the contrary, it allows problems and relevant information to surface before it is too late to act.
Why read The Great God Pan at Halloween?
Because Arthur Machen builds a horror story grounded above all in anticipation, the unseen and the limits of perception. The Great God Pan does not rely on a constant sequence of frightening events, but on the possibility that behind known reality lies something human beings were never meant to see. The new 2026 Feltrinelli edition, published at the end of September, also makes it a particularly fitting read for October.